virtualization.info Editors

The open source virtualization platform KVM has been included in the Linux kernel since version 2.6.20, in February 2007, and slowly made its way into many popular Linux distributions, including Knoppix, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora, and very soon Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux Server (SLES).

Despite that, smaller ISVs have been shy so far to build on top of KVM and offer low cost virtual infrastructures that could rival with the only significant player in this space at the moment: Red Hat.

Things may be changing in the near future: now that Red Hat is investing in promoting its RHEV virtual infrastructure and there’s a growing awareness around KVM, new platforms may start to appear.

The first example is KaOS, a lightweight, open source KVM-based virtual machine monitor developed by Carbon Mountain.

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virtualization.info and its partner Kybernetika are extremely pleased to announce today that Cisco Systems (in cooperation with VMware) selected our on-demand data center Rent-A-Lab (RAL) to host all its European road shows and bootcamps for Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco already selected RAL in the past to run the first UCS Bootcamp in Switzerland, and now the partnership is expanding to serve the entire Europe. 
When customers sign up for an event like this one in UK or Ireland, or an event like this one in Netherlands, they now know that RAL is the backend infrastructure.

In March we announced the expansion of virtualization.info RAL to 40 enterprise-class servers, and the migration to a new, shiny facility in the Zurich downtown. But we did more than that in this timeframe:

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While VMware continues to morph its corporate mission by acquiring more companies in the SaaS and PaaS cloud computing markets and continues to change its leadership team, its stock performance continues to improve.

This is what happened in the last two years, starting mid June 2008, just two weeks before Paul Maritz replaced Diane Greene as CEO of the company and VMware started to expand in completely new markets:

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The Canadian startup Enomaly continues to collect remarkable recognitions: after being featured by Intel in a IaaS cloud computing blueprint in April, the company scored a deal with HP to include its Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) Service Provider Edition (SPE) in the OEM’s cloud computing solutions for providers.

The hardware configurations promoted by HP, and powered by Enomaly, include DL and SL servers, StorageWorks MSA2000i, P4000 or X9000 arrays and ProCurve 2900, 6600 and 5400/8200 networking switches.
Here’s an example:

Just yesterday Virtual Computer released a free version of its platform wrapper NxTop.
The product, capped to 5 managed computers, includes the Xen-based client hypervisor and the management console NxTop Center.

While free of charge, customers that look at it as a consumer technology may be disappointed: there’s no way in fact to create new virtual machines on the local console without installing and using NxTop Center.

But Virtual Computer’s Senior Director of Product Management & Marketing, Doug Lane, just informed virtualization.info that a stand-alone client hypervisor is in the work too:

…we have a stand-alone hypervisor option in the works that will allow users to create VMs directly on the client hypervisor in cases where they do not wish to stand up a Hyper-V server. We expect to have this out within the next couple of months. This will open up the NxTop free download to an even larger population of potential users.

The startup Trustware launched in August 2006, entering the application virtualization market with a consumer-oriented product called BufferZone.

BufferZone didn’t get much traction so far and the company updated it just four times in four years. And now there’s a chance that the company will shift its focus out of the x86 virtualization market.

A recent article appeared on TopNews.in titles Trustware develops the pioneering malware for Android:

The first of a kind of malware for Google’s Android smartphone OS has been designed by a group of researchers at Trustware.

The malware aids in easy access of private information, such as bank credentials, text messages, GPS coordinates and call logs from the smartphone, claims the researchers from Trustware.

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The last time virtualization.info covered the US startup MokaFive was in April, to report about a third round of funding equal to $21M, and in May to report about a new version of its flagship product called Suite.

MokaFive Suite 2.8, released almost one year since version 2.0, didn’t introduce any new feature but the support for an additional virtualization engine: Oracle VM VirtualBox.

Over the last four years the company changed its go-to-market strategy a couple of times, and the decision to support side-by-side VMware and Oracle hosted virtualization platforms is a demonstration that MokaFive is still trying to figure out how to position itself in the most effective way.

Now the strategy may change again as the startup just announced the development of a client hypervisor: MokaFive BareMetal.

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The application virtualization startup Endeavors Technologies (formerly Steam Theory) certainly had one of the most complex and painful evolutions in the virtualization market.

From May 2006 to October 2007 the company was involved in patent lawsuits with Microsoft (after the Softricity acquisition), Citrix, AppStream and Exent.
In May 2008, it mistakenly announced the advent of a new Microsoft licensing (SPLA) which allows 3rd parties to stream Office.
In July 2008 the company suspended its share from the London Stock Exchange detailing a difficult financial situation.
And finally, in August 2008, it entered into controlled administration.

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Now that Citrix is about to release of XenClient, and the product seems to get serious attention, other companies offering client hypervisors have a problem.

This includes, for example, Virtual Computer and Neocleus which both offer a Xen-based bare metal virtual machine monitor (VMM) for consumer laptops since a few months.

While Citrix will not offer all the capabilities of these competitors in the first version of XenClient, it’s still true that its product will be available for free.
Competitors have two choices: try to compete with XenClient or drop their own Xen implementations and build on top of it (which is what Citrix probably wants).

The first choice implies a major effort since the startups above don’t have as much resources as Citrix for R&D and marketing. And more than that, they don’t have a powerful ally like Microsoft, that may step-in at some point in the near future and further help the adoption of XenClient.
On the other side, remaining independent allows these companies to potentially deliver innovation faster than Citrix, gaining enough brand value and market share for a successful, future acquisition.

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At virtualization.info we usually don’t cover case studies. But a virtualization vendor that describes its own virtual infrastructure is well worth an exception.

In the past Microsoft already provided a few details about its internal implementation of Hyper-V, but it has now expose much more through a 23-pages whitepaper titled How Microsoft Moved to a Virtualized Infrastructure:

Microsoft.com Operations (MSCOM Ops), a team within the Microsoft Information Technology (Microsoft IT) division that manages the Microsoft.com Web site, faced the same budgetary pressures that affect many businesses today: It needed to constrain capital spending, optimize the use of existing hardware, and reduce operational costs. Using the traditional IT model of “Decommission the old and buy newer, more-powerful servers” continued to result in a lot of unused storage, network, and compute capacity. The number of physical servers provisioned to support business needs was growing at a rate of approximately 20 percent per year during a time when budget continued to shrink. In spite of earlier and significant investments in physical server hardware, Microsoft.com was using less than 10 percent of the available processing power and 30 percent of the storage space.

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